Metallically Black

What the hell is happening to me?

Over this past month, I have been experiencing the most debilitating writer’s block of my life. I’ve gone much longer without writing in the past but I’ve never wanted so badly to put something on paper and been so uninspired – creatively. It almost feels like I’m working against myself. Who else could stop me from doing something that I really want to do so effectively?

I’ve always worked best in an echo chamber, as silly as it sounds. I think that bouncing my own ideas around and having them return to me a hundred times in a hundred subsequent stages of transformation and degradation allows me to produce my most pretentious, self-involved bullshit. That bullshit is, at first, revolting and shameful to me but, in time, refined into something that I can be proud of. I haven’t had an opportunity to get into any of that self-important, pseudo-philosophical rambling fuckery lately because I have been around way too many people. I have always had a tiny social battery. I’ve been running it on E for a while now and I think that it’s starting to fester, foam, and fray. I’ve got to throw that cancerous shit in the trash and shop around for a (hopefully larger) replacement.

I haven’t written any serious fiction since completing my manuscript in November. I am missing those characters so desperately that I am flirting with depression. I think that I may have even written that exact sentence once or twice in the last few weeks – either in my journal or a blog post. It rings true, so it makes sense to me that I would repeat it in different mediums without realizing it. I want to return to them, to Her, but everything that I’ve read informs me that I should take time away from the material to decompress, lest I be burned out. The problem is this: I don’t actually want to decompress. I want to go deeper into Her world and put to paper all of the wild, pressing, and inspired parts of her life that have been soaring through my thoughts, dreams, and notebooks. I want to go underground again and spend every waking moment scrawling into loose-leaf paper or rattling at the keyboard for seven months until I’ve got another completed manuscript: The Life Of Alma – 1990! Put me in the fucking Hyperbolic Time Chamber from DBZ. What I wouldn’t give up for a chance to do that … what I wouldn’t sacrifice … what I wouldn’t do. I’m sure I’d find the inspiration then.

I think that I should try writing some flash fiction. Random snippets of genre stories. That could get some creative energy sparking the coils again. I am not very good at writing short fiction. The first short story that I was proud of ended up being fifteen-thousand words and was used as a preamble to a one-hundred-twenty-thousand word manuscript. I’ve just never seen the point in forcing a story into such small confines if I can see an inspired larger picture. But short fiction writing is an art form of its own. I’ll just need to try my hand at it for a while.

My Spanish is garbage now so I’ve been doing lessons at home to get it all back. That feels productive to me though I don’t know what I’ll do with it other than communicate with more people, which could put me into a deeper non-creative hole.

I swear to God, my life is a spiraling joke. I just hope the fucking punchline is worth it.